This isn’t easy since the contents of the smoke include about five grams of tobacco aside from the hash. Plus, one has to make the pipe burn sufficiently because to only partially consume the hashish would be disgraceful. But I had the knack. The pipe boy winked with approval, emptied the pipe and replaced it with another for Samy. I remarked on his uncanny ability to send the smoke in two perfectly bisected jets from his nose, one flowing east, one west. Samy sensed my awe, and seized the moment to pursue our earlier conversation.
‘So, is it true that in your country they put the people in the box, and then into the hole with the box and everything?’ Like most Egyptians he pronounced all words that begin with a ‘P’ as if they began with a ‘B’ because ‘P’ does not exist in the Arabic alphabet. Hence ‘but the beoble in the box.’ I nodded, now engaged in the slightly easier task of attacking bipe number two.
‘But what if they haven’t got a box?’ Samy asked reasonably, coughing a little with his mouth closed, smoke dribbling in white ribbons from his nose before exhaling the mother load.
‘They buy one. I mean, maybe they can’t afford a nice one so they just get a cheap one,’ I answered democratically before confronting my third pipe.
Samy smiled brightly. ‘Ahh, berhaps then your American government is giving sbecial boxes for the boor beoble?’ He lovingly handled the long stick that he applied daintily to his mouth, taking the spoon from the boy to tamp down the coals more firmly.
‘No, Samy, it’s not like that. If you don’t have the money for a box, you go and chop down a tree or something, but no box, no hole.’
Samy’s eyes were slightly glazed as he labored to comprehension. I disposed of the fourth pipe and explained in greater detail.
‘It’s like this. In America and even in Europe they’ve got this habit of putting the people in boxes. People make a living out of making the boxes. Some of them are really nice, lined with silk cushions. Other are less comfortable and just plain. Some are even made of brass and cost lots of money, just like the pharaohs, you see?’
Samy nodded thoughtfully and polished off another pipe. I approached my final one with a sense of achievement. Samy, too, did justice to his fifth, imagining a place where everyone has his own box, even in death. The idea of such luxury was strange to him, belonging to a world where everything is shared, even the communal bier that serves as final transport to an often common grave, and where burial (within twenty-four hours of death according to Koranic injunction) is one of the few expedients in an existence otherwise bereft of the concept of haste. ‘Are you sure that they go in with the box and that the box stays there, too, for all the time?’ he asked.
‘Sure I’m sure.’
The café animated with men come to take their nocturnal ease, playing backgammon and drinking glasses of sugary, dark, steaming tea. One of them was dressed in an immaculate white galabeyya, ‘King’ Hussein, a Clark Gable lookalike and recent guest of one of Cairo’s prison dungeons, a confirmed ‘hashesh’ or hash smoker. King was one of the usual suspects, a small-time hash retailer that took the rap for larger dealers during purges of the quarter. These raids were choreographed to portray Sadat as a stern disciplinarian to gratify international funding agencies and the non-smoking segment of the population. What they actually ended up doing was making local heroes out of the fall guys. Everyone knew the Sadat himself was a hashesh. We shared a round of pipes with King and Samy suggested walking to the City of the Dead to continue smoking.
Known in Arabic as the ‘Toorab,’ which means ‘cemetery’ as well as ‘dust,’ the City of the Dead is adjacent to the Old City, an immense desert sprawl peppered with the unmarked tombs of the populace and a community of small villa-like mausoleums that characterized the golden ages of Islam. Boulevards great and small are laid out in a sober grid with an orderliness that the living city never achieved. They are lined with walled frontage interrupted by intricate wrought-iron gates, or domed constructions. There were few cars here and considering the space, fewer people. Yet the City of the Dead was alive with people come to take residence in the tombs of their, or someone else’s, forbears. Ancestors make excellent landlords.
According to Islamic custom, Fridays are set aside for visiting the cemetery and in the old days this meant a bit of a journey so the visitors would sometimes spend the night. The tombs were designed to accommodate both the living and the dead according to their divergent needs. Those of the well-to-do vary in size, materials and decor, from the modest to the marvelous. Many had courtyards, sometimes equipped with a source of water. The buildings house the remains of the deceased, moldering somewhere safely underground with perhaps a stone or marble throne-like sculpture to mark the grave. The Egyptians say, ‘better misery than the cemetery.’ The people living in the City of the Dead enjoyed a rare taste of both.
Adequate housing in Cairo is a thing of the past and the City of the Dead offered an attractive alternative to, some say, millions of the otherwise homeless. For Infinite Lease: quiet, spacious, luminous semi-detached and detached family tombs. Over the years the people of the Toorab organized pirating electricity and telecommunications lines from the city. They opened shops to fix radios and TVs, make mattresses and sell groceries. Laundry fluttered on clothes lines strung between tombstones. Children came home from school to the tombs and played soccer in the wide boulevards beside the decorated domes capping the crypts of forgotten Mamluk nobility. We arrived at a smoking establishment belonging to someone named Ali; a courtyard where ducks and chickens pattered about a small mud puddle beside a beautifully carved alabaster tomb marker. Our host wasted no time in calling one of his girls to serve us.
About fifteen pipes later, having admired Orion’s Belt in a silence interrupted only by the chugging of the water pipe for an hour or three, we began our journey back to the living and along the way a taxi sidled up lazily beside us. Samy knew the driver and exchanged pleasantries with him and his passenger. The driver offered us a ride and I was inclined to refuse noting the care-worn condition of the car but Samy insisted they were friends and getting a taxi leaving the City of the Dead could be problematic.
The taxi was a typical black-and-white Russian-assembled Fiat wreck. I had difficulty getting the door to close, but this was not unusual. We cruised through the Dead City and I relaxed, admiring the occasional decaying monument on the way back on the main street where a roundabout is manned by motley traffic cops and today, a careful of police officers. We stopped and for some reason the police officers asked the driver for his papers. This is fairly normal. What was completely nonpareil was the driver’s response. He barked something very impolite to the officer, threw the old Fiat into second gear and pulled out posthaste, shifting brusquely to pick up steam. I shared the officer’s astonishment since the driver turned back towards the Toorab and was decidedly not going my way.
We were off like a slow-motion torpedo. I objected mildly to the driver’s indiscretion and his choice of direction. ‘What’s going on?’ I asked Samy. We’d covered a considerable amount of ground and were still being followed. He turned around casually to look out of the rear window and said, ‘It’s OK. The police are following us. We will come back later.’ I nodded with drug-induced oriental acquiescence. Samy added lamely, ‘Don’t worry, we’re in a taxi,’ meaning we were innocent of whatever our conductors were running from.
Suddenly in a gut-wrenching maneuver worthy of a Hollywood stunt driver, our chauffeur pulled off the street, jumped a curb, wheeled giddily around a massive pile of garbage and onto a tomb-lined alley. We had regained the Toorab, familiar territory to our navigator. Although the police followed us in, they slowed down a moment later while we made several quick turns into the maze. Their attempt to nab us was halfhearted at best. Samy explained, ‘It is forbidden,’ and I supposed he referred to a religious taboo to do with the cemetery. I assumed that the City of the Dead was a holy sanctuary and off-limits to the police.
Amid much thigh-slapping and congratulatio
ns we slowed to a halt and the boys jumped out of the car. Cigarettes were exuberantly offered and lit all around. The driver opened the trunk and I discovered the reason for our getaway. I drew back as I saw what appeared to be a body in a shroud. I gathered from the irreverent conversation that I was actually looking at approximately eighty kilos of hashish. I nudged Samy, speechless. ‘I told you not to worry,’ he said. ‘This is a very sacred place.’ I said that seemed appropriate, due to the presence of the dead. ‘No way,’ Samy answered, ‘it’s because it’s where they keep the hashish.’
Nile-Eyes, 2001
Charles Nicholl
The Fruit Palace – 1
‘I LEARNED TO cook cocaine in Cali, ’68, ’69. I learned from a Chilean chemist. The Chileans were the best cooks then. He was selling his secrets. There were others like him coming into Colombia at this time.
‘My first kitchen I built myself, up in the hills above the Rio Cauca, near a village called Las Animas – the Spirits. This is in the country of the Gumbianos. These are Indians that chew the coca leaf – well, a lot of them get drunk on chicha, but some still use the leaf. There are some cocales there, and plenty of coca in the markets. The Gumbianos are good, strong people. Few words, much patience. They prune the coca bush small, about a metre high. They call their bushes ilyimera, which in their language means little birds.
‘I was the first blanco to set up a cocaine kitchen in this area. At first they thought I was crazy. A Gumbiano who chews the leaf perhaps uses half a pound a week. I was going into the markets and buying up four arrobas – 1001b of leaves at a time. In those days you could buy an arroba of coca for fifty pesos. With good leaves and good chemistry, 1001b of leaves will give you 1lb of cocaine.
‘Later I made a deal with a grower and bought the leaves fresh from the total. The bright, undried leaves are the best for cooking.’
Mario spoke with slow, gruff precision. The voice was untroubled, but there was always a challenge in his eye. His beard jutted. He sent out jets of smoke through his nostrils like a cartoon bull. There are, he explained, essentially two stages in the ‘cooking’ of cocaine. ‘De coca a pasta, y de pasta a perica.’ From coca leaf to cocaine paste or base, and from cocaine paste to crystalline cocaine. The first is a simple process of extraction, which draws out the all-important vegetable alkaloids from the leaf.
‘The cocaine is hiding inside the leaf,’ said Mario. ‘The cocinero must get inside the leaf and fetch out the little bit of cocaine.’ His thin hands writhed to gesture this process.
There are many alkaloids in the coca leaf, but only one of them is the psychoactive substance known to organic chemists as benzoyl-methyl-ecgonine, and to the world as cocaine. The second, more complex stage of the cooking is designed to separate the cocaine from the other alkaloids, and to crystallise it into a salt. The coca grown in Colombia and Peru, the trujillo leaf (Erythroxylon novogranatense), has a slightly lower proportion of cocaine to other alkaloids than the Bolivian strain, the huanaco leaf (Erythroxylon coca).
‘To make the pasta out of coca leaves is very simple. You need some petrol: kerosene is best. You need a quantity of sulphuric acid, and you need an alkali. For alkali you can use lime or sodium carbonate. I used the simplest of all: potasa.’ Potasa, or potash, is a crude form of potassium carbonate derived from vegetable ash. ‘Most of all, you need patience,’ he added.
‘The first part of the operation is what we call la salada, the salting. Here you sprinkle and mix the potash into the leaves. If you are treating a big volume of leaves, you can do this in a pit lined with plastic sheeting. Otherwise you do it in an oil drum or plastic bucket. When you have salted the leaves you let them stand for a few hours. The potash makes them sweat. It starts to melt the alkaloids in the leaf.
‘The second part is la mojadura, the soaking. This is when we pour the kerosene on to the leaves, drown the coca. You can also put in a bit of dilute sulphuric acid to help break the leaves down. After the soaking you must leave everything to steep for at least a day, better for thirty-six hours. While you wait, the potash is drawing out the alkaloids from the leaf. They float free in the kerosene, which holds them.
‘By the end of the second day you are ready to begin la prensa, the pressing. If you don’t have a press, you use your feet, like they do when they make chicha.’ (Chicha is maize liquor, a traditional campesino hooch now officially outlawed in Colombia.) ‘The purpose of la prensa is to get as much of the kerosene out of the leaves as possible. The kerosene is rich with the alkaloids. The leaves are dead now, black and rotten. You siphon off the kerosene into drums and throw away the leaves.
‘The fourth stage is very delicate. This is when we take the alkaloids out of the gasolene and put them in water. This is done by pouring in water and sulphuric acid. Again you leave it, absolutely still, for a day. The acid goes in and takes the alkaloids, and they are dissolved in the water. We call this part of the process la guaraperia. At the end you have the kerosene on the top, and the guarapo underneath. The guarapo is a solution of cocaine and the other alkaloids.’ (In ordinary circumstances, guarapo is the name of a drink, either a juice or a liquor, made from sugar cane.)
‘Into the guarapo you pour more potash. This makes the alkaloids precipitate. You see the guarapo go milky-white. This is the first time the cocaine becomes visible. If you have some ammonia this is the best for precipitation.
‘Now you are ready for the last part of the operation: la secaderia, the drying. This is filtering out the precipitate – you can use a sheet – and drying it in the sun or under lightbulbs. You dry it until it is like moist clay. And so you have it: la pasta de cocaina!’
So far, so good. You had your cocaine paste, the greenish-grey sludge that is the building block of the whole cocaine racket. This is already a valuable commodity. It can be dried off and sold as basuko. It is chemically stable, and can be transported through any climate without damaging its potency. How much it is worth depends on where you stand on the ladder, who you are selling to, and in what quantity. At today’s prices a pound of pasta can fetch anything from $500 to $2,000.
But what about the other half of the operation, the turning of pasta into pure cocaine, snorter’s snow? This is where the real money lies. A good cook can turn that pound of pasta into nearly the same weight of cocaine, worth around $5,000 on the Bogotá market. Here, however, I was to be disappointed. Perhaps Mario did not consider me worthy to enter this secret inner sanctum of cocaine chemistry. Perhaps I hadn’t paid enough. Perhaps he was getting forgetful himself. It was eight years since he’d done any cooking. He had been nearly killed when a carboy of ether exploded in his outhouse laboratory at Las Animas. He showed me the burns on his back, marbled whorls of tissue. The fire had destroyed his materials and, worse, it had burned up most of the money he had saved. He had given up then. One of the big, Cali-based refining groups that began to emerge in the late 1970s offered to set him up with a backstreet kitchen, but he refused. He had been a cook for the love of it, he said, not the money. He was a mano verde, an old-style cocaine alchemist. He spat on the mafia, the faceless peces gordos, who ran the business now. I tried to wheedle the process out of him, but in the scrawled scraps of my notes from that night I find only broken phrases:
Potassium permanganate: knocks out the inessential alkaloids by oxidisation . . .
Organic solvents: acetone, ether, benzole, toluol. Toluol best, balsam of tofu, derived from Caribbean tree . . .
Gas crystals . . .
Hydrochloric acid bonds with cocaine alkaloid to form a crystalline salt. Snorter’s snow is cocaine hydrochloride. Sometimes other acids used: cocaine sulphate, oxalate, hypochlorate . . .
Balance. Too much acid, coke will be agrio, sour. Too much carbonate, coke will be jabonoso, soapy . . .
To the aspiring drug chemist these might mean something. They don’t mean much to me, as I’m sure Mario knew. His demeanour was getting uglier. He was tired of my questions. He threw the information out impatie
ntly He ran a hand over his furrowed brow. I decided it was time to give it a rest. I’d had my fifty quid’s worth.
The Fruit Palace, 1985
John Hopkins
Tangier Buzzless Flies
IN THE COUNTRYARD of the Hotel Splendid Boujma was cutting kif. Seated on a straw hassock before a low wooden table, he began by rubbing the dry kif branches between his hands. The tiny leaves and seeds fell onto a piece of wrapping paper spread out on the table as he discarded the empty stalks one by one.
Next he shook the leaves and seeds onto a wooden cutting board, which he tilted carefully, allowing the seeds to roll down the board as he ran his hand gently over the kif. This process took some time. The seeds were placed in their own piece of wrapping paper and set aside. Now Boujma rested for a minute and took out his own supply of kif and had a smoke. Above his head the banana leaves stirred in the evening breeze. A few feet away the Sultan of Dogs lay in the hole it had dug for itself.
The hotel was quiet, with a few noises filtering in from the street. The pipe finished, Boujma resumed his work. Taking out a pocket knife, he sharpened it carefully against a stone. Separating a portion of the cleaned kif from the main pile, he pressed it firmly down on the board with his fingers and, wielding the knife like a paper cutter, commenced chopping the kif. This is a lengthy procedure, and when the kif had reached the consistency of rough powder, he poured it into a sardine can with a perforated bottom. The sardine can contained a bright Kennedy fifty-cent piece, which he shook together with the kif. The fine kif sifted onto another piece of paper, which Boujma folded over and placed beneath him on the hassock. The kif that had not passed through the perforations was dumped back onto the board to be recut with the next batch. And so, the work went on. When all of the kif had been satisfactorily chopped and sifted, Boujma reached for a wrinkled leaf of tobacco, sprinkled water on it, and began to cut and sift it as he had done the kif. This done, he brought out the kif, which had become a warm flat cake beneath his weight, mixed it with the smaller amount of tobacco, and recut and resifted it all together. The blend had a greenish-brown color, and although Boujma had chopped it very finely, each grain of tobacco and kif was separated from every other.